After watching this video I feel like the best microwave I’ve ever used sucked very badly. What you see here is a concept for the Heat Map Microwave, which would have a built-in IR camera on top and a screen on the front, effectively allowing you to see exactly when your food has been heated all the way through. Get this thing in my kitchen right now.

29 August 2014

Thermal cameras were once expensive and bulky hunks of equipment that very few people could get their hands on. No longer. With FLIR’s new iPhone case thermal imaging cameras are now both affordable and incredibly discreet, which means that evil-doers can use it to see the thermal signature your fingers leave on a keypad and steal your ATM PIN. Here’s a very simple way to thwart that.

17 April 2014

You wouldn’t think that a four-wheeled car would go faster if one of its wheels didn’t touch the ground. Or if its axles were bent. Or if it was designed to grind against a wall. You would be wrong, and here’s the science to prove it.

6 December 2013

Back in May, our friend and ex-NASA JPL engineer Mark Rober, figured out a way to shoot “bullet time” videos on the cheap, with a ceiling fan, a pair of torches and a GoPro. Pretty damn creative, but the rig had its limitations. So Mark set out to find a way to create a similar setup, this time using a high-end Phantom camera. Thank goodness.

1 November 2013

ago, NASA engineer Mark Rober blew YouTube’s mind with a video of his Halloween costume: a hole in his chest. Or at least it looked like a hole in his chest. In fact, it was an optical illusion made possible by two iPads, a little duct tape and a lot of ingenuity. Well, you won’t believe what he’s been up to since then.

8 October 2013

Two years ago, a NASA engineer named Mark Rober emailed us a halloween costume that used two iPads to make it look like you had a gaping hole in your stomach. This year the system is both more refined and more gruesome.

30 November 2012

Are there any here among us who didn’t watch Scooby Doo as a kid, see a villain spying (with blinking eyes) behind a picture on the wall, and secretly wish we could do that? We may never be allowed to carve holes in our walls, but we can still make that dream come true.

17 August 2012

With all the excitement of the seven minutes of terror (and glory), it’s easy to forget that there were seven years of suffering and hard work to make it all happen. Seven years of the life of people like Adam Steltzner or our friend Mark Rober.